Racing ahead with my rough cut of the animation: I’ve reached 700 BC already, only another two years of rhubarb history to go!
Rhubarb Titles
Here’s the rough cut version of the titles of my Brief History of Rhubarb animation. There’s lots of little improvements I could make to this but I need to see the whole two or three minute film first before I get into those final touches.
Like so many wildlife photographers, I’ve gone for a bit of slow motion in my opening shot of a mammoth discovering that rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid and other chemicals as a defence against grazing animals. The slow motion wasn’t deliberate, but I’m still getting used to the timeline in Adobe Animate.
The Rhubarb Patch
Having sorted out such knotty issues as the mammoth’s trunk, I’m now turning my attention to the titles for my Rhubarb Festival animation. This suitably homespun title introduces the section where we meet the head gardener, Rhuben, leans over his garden gate to talk rhubarb.
Mammoth Task
As a change from Character Animator, I went to another Adobe program, Animate, for the mammoth sequence. There’s a tool that adds a mesh to my drawing, so that I can deform the shape from frame to frame. Also very useful is that if I bend the trunk on frame 25 of a sequence it will add a smooth transition. When I worked on Watership Down we had key animators, who drew the start and finish of the movement of a character and other animators who filled in the gaps, a process known as tweening.
Once I’d mastered the techniques of tweening and warping the mesh, I then had difficulty bringing the whole thing together. My final lesson was that everything: the mammoth’s trunk, its right ear, its left ear and even the tusks, which don’t move at all, needed
Rhubarb Sketchbook
I’ve got most of my Brief History of Rhubarb animation in the can and all the artwork completed but I’m still working on the scene where a man picks up glass of rhubarb aperitif. It’s a surprisingly tricky bit of animation to get right but I’m determined not to fudge it and ‘cheat’, so hopefully I’ll get it to work smoothly over the weekend.
In the meantime I’m planning my next animation for the Rhubarb Festival Richard Bell’s Rhubarb Triangle Sketchbook.
My storyboard (above) gives the gist of it, a sketchbook brought to life, with the drawn characters, such as a Middleton collier, telling the story themselves. I’ll then pan around the page for close-ups of relevant pen and watercolour drawings.
I’m using picture maps and pen and watercolour drawings that I drew for my booklet Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle, so I’ve got plenty of material to choose from to tell my story and conjure up an impression of Rhubarb Triangle country.
Bunny-hopping Pigeon
The male wood pigeon’s display as he follows the female around the lawn, includes short bunny hops, jumping an inch in the air and an inch forward. He then makes a series of deep, polite bows.
How can she resist him? She glances at him with embarrassed coyness and goes on pecking at the spilt sunflower hearts beneath the feeders.
Arboretum
On our regular walks around Newmillerdam Lake, I’ll often take the upper path via the arboretum, while Barbara and her brother stick to the lakeside. We were a bit later starting today, so, change of plan, I headed straight for the Lakeside Cafe, where I sketched the stone-built house over my latte and flapjack, before heading clockwise past the war memorial and meeting up with Barbara and her brother at the boathouse, near the end of their anticlockwise circuit of the lake.
Most in evidence today, tufted ducks dotted ten or twenty yards from the shore, hunkering down from the cool breeze blowing up the valley, in an area where we often see them diving for freshwater mussels.
The Elusive Glass of Zucca
Rabarbaro Zucca
A man walks into a bar, not just any bar, this is the famed Zucca’s Bar in Milan, and orders the speciality, Rabarbaro Zucca, a rhubarb-based aperitif. But he’s out of luck, I’m only halfway through the tutorial on how a character picks up an object in the Adobe Character Animator tutorial, so he’s going to have to wait until tomorrow to finally get that drink.
The Rhubarb Express
My latest animation: the Rhubarb Express from Ardsley Station in the heart of Rhubarb Triangle, taking forced rhubarb to London.
Rhubarb by Candlelight
I’m steadily getting there with my animations for the Rhubarb Festival. For the forcing shed sequence, I’ve kept exactly to my original comic strip. I can add sound effects and lighting effects later, but for the moment, this tells the story just as I did in the booklet.
Culpeper Speaks
Take one of Culpeper’s talk about the medicinal qualities of rhubarb. Perhaps I’ll come back and re-record the voiceover and add one or two sound effects but after a weekend sorting out various technical challenges, at least I’ve got him moving and talking.